The subject-matter of this invention is a belt conveyor for the sorting of sundry articles.
Numerous types of conveyors intended for the sorting of different kinds of articles are presently known. These multipurpose conveyors have many applications: they may be used, for instance, as dispensers for stores, assembly lines, automatic restaurants and canteens, hospitals, community facilities and, in general, for the sorting and forwarding of postal articles. Particularly important among the conveyors presently known are the so-called "belt conveyors" which use as conveyor components the same components which support the articles, suitably powered. This applicant has already conceived a belt conveyor which is provided at the nodal sorting points with a sorting unit capable of alternating belts and rollers moving in opposite directions. This sorting unit is protected by and described in Italian Pat. No. 1.025.846 to which the reader is referred for further information. Subsequent improvements have allowed the construction of multilevel belt conveyors always using the abovementioned sorting unit at the nodal points. Several series-connected sorting units forming a single sorting line have also been used.
All the improvements mentioned above are designed for the construction of belt conveyors capable of carrying an increasingly larger number of articles and of sorting these articles in such a way that the path described by any one article does not interfere with the paths of the neighboring articles. This result is particularly difficult to obtain and has led to the construction of highly complicated and consequently expensive installations. The technical task of the present invention is to design a conveyor which, in spite of a substantially simple and comparatively inexpensive construction, is capable of carrying and distributing a considerable amount of articles, each having an independent path. Within the framework of this technical task, an important target of the present invention consists in designing a conveyor which may also be used in combination with other conveyors already known such as, for instance, the conveyor provided with the above-mentioned sorting unit described in the Italian Pat. No. 1.025.846.
A further purpose of this invention is to design a conveyor which may be easily constructed in the most disparate structural forms so as to be suitablee for as many specific requirements.